Long term planning of our megacities

PUNCHLINE

Ike Señeres

At a recent meeting of the Corinthian Coffee Clutch (C3), we had the good fortune of top architect Jun Palafox joining us. Jun is actually a member of C3, but his projects here and abroad have prevented him from attending regularly. It was a good time for Jun to attend, as we talked about the long term planning of megacities in general and environmental sustainability in particular.

Although he is generally known to be primarily an architect, it was no surprise to everyone in the meeting when he started talking about graft and corruption, and how it affects national development, particularly as it applies to the construction of built environments.

Hearing Jun is like taking a roller coaster ride, as we were inspired by what good planning could do in improving the quality of life in our cities, and yet we were also depressed by the fact that for the most part, the awareness of good planning has apparently not entered the consciousness of our government planners. Among the many concepts that he discussed, I liked best his proposal to make our cities more liveable by making them walk-able and bike-able.

What is surprising is what he said nonchalantly that walking is a means of transportation, and the government is apparently not aware of that either.

Jun actually mentioned several good suggestions, but among what he said, I remember most five topics, namely (1) the remediation of flood prone areas so that these could become high value human settlements, (2) the construction of mega buildings that could go as high as three kilometres, (3) the selling of air rights over lower buildings, (4) the integration of plants and flowers in the vertical design of buildings and (5) the evolution of “Agropolitan”  megacities, a term so new that my word processing software could not even recognize it.

As I understand it, an “Agropolis” is a megacity wherein there is a good balance between agriculture (green) and the built environment (blue) and so I also took the opportunity to talk about my green and blue advocacy. As we have seen it happen for many years already, farmlands are destroyed as subdivisions and commercial buildings are built over them.

As Jun was explaining it, it is actually possible to make both agriculture and architecture coexist, and by doing so, the resulting settlements would not only be liveable, these would also be sustainable especially when it comes to food security.

As Eleanor Roosevelt had said, “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; and small minds discuss people”. That is precisely what we are trying to do at C3, to gather great minds as much as possible, as much as they are willing to help, so that we could discuss ideas that would be good for the nation.            In doing so, we would like to think that we are functioning as a private think tank for nation building, sincerely wishing and hoping as well that we could be given the chance to share our ideas with the government, elected politicians and career bureaucrats alike.

Perhaps it could be said that some politicians only have average minds because they could only discuss events. We see this whenever some politicians would react only to current events as these are mentioned in the news, after that, we do not hear from them again, as if the subject matter has gone out of fashion. The bottom line here is that many local government units (LGUs) do not even have land use plans, more so the Municipal Development Plans (MDPs) that are required of them as an output of their Municipal Development Coordinating Councils (MDCCs).

Looking at it another way, the relocation of flood victims are just events that any politician with an average mind could do. Beyond that however, we need ideas so that we could build long terms solutions to the problem of disaster risks, and that is where we need great minds to deal with these problems.

Being the businessman that he is aside from just being an architect, Jun understands very well that these problems could not only be solved, the solutions could also create opportunities as land values would go up and the local economies would also improve.

As I understand it, the government is focusing more on medium term planning, rather than long term planning. That means that presently, the government is unable to look beyond twenty years as far as planning is concerned. Actually, it is difficult for the government to plan beyond six years, because that is only how long a presidential term is. That is also the reason why our government planners could hardly look at the long term, because their term is only short, coterminous only with their appointing authority.

In order to prepare for the eventual emergence of megacities, we really have to plan ahead for more than twenty years, even better if we could plan ahead for forty or sixty years. In order to do that however, we need to bring back the career undersecretaries, assistant secretaries and directors in the line departments, because only the career officials are capable of planning ahead for many years, without being cut short by term limits that are politically motivated. In short, we should really insulate our career planners from political influence, if we really want a well planned future.

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